health

Chance encounter with woman leaves me grateful for my health

By David McElroy · November 24, 2018

When I saw her walking toward my table, her face was familiar, but it took me a long moment to place where I’d known her.

I hadn’t seen Dana for about six months. I didn’t know her well, but I used to talk with her casually when she worked at a restaurant where I go a lot. She left quit that job earlier this year and she hadn’t crossed my mind until tonight.

At first, I couldn’t even remember her name, but I exchanged empty pleasantries with her anyway. I asked how she had been, but it was mostly just a polite question to which I expected a simple answer, but her answer wasn’t simple.

She told me that she left this job for a job at another restaurant. As she was getting ready for her second day of work at the new place, she felt something happen inside her body. She knew it was serious but she didn’t know quite what was going on.

Dana went to an emergency room and found out she had just suffered a stroke. She hasn’t been able to return to work since then.

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Sad husband: ‘My beautiful wife is dying; I’m so sad I can’t sleep’

By David McElroy · November 17, 2018

The yellowed face in the picture caught my attention when I noticed the pinkish color of the healthy hand on her forehead. And then I noticed the man’s summary of his story.

“Here she is, Teresa,” the anonymous man wrote on a social media post. “She’s the love of my life, and today is her birthday. And she’s dying.”

This is not my story. I have very little to add to it. But this couple’s story touched me. There’s nothing we can do to help them. But Teresa is dying of liver disease and he’s terrified and heartbroken. The very least we can do is listen to their story.

“She’s getting sicker every day,” the husband writes. “She gets confused from high ammonia levels. She’s yellow because her liver is failing. She’s in pain, and can’t take anything because of the bad liver.”

In the midst of their fear and pain, he recounts that he’s thankful that Teresa walked into the company where he worked around 8 a.m. on Sept. 23, 1983. He said he had to work up the courage to ask her out — and he worded the question vaguely in case she turned him down. But he had to ask her out, he said, because “I fell in love with her eyes the first time I saw her.”

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Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

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